Ghosted
by cherryblossomthundercrash
Summary: halloween fic
1. haunted

**a/n**: posted first on tumblr ( /**_uchiharvno_**) but here, have a halloween treat! keep in mind, the structure is nonlinear.

belated happy halloween!

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[290]

The nightmares started after they went into the haunted house.

Sakura wakes up in a cold sweat, gasping for air and clutching tightly at her chest, for the nth time that week. She never remembers what happens in the nightmare, just that she wakes up filled with dread and genuine fear, feeling like someone is coming after her.

She cries herself back to sleep because it feels so _real_.

[310]

Sakura is different in the days after it happens. She's quiet, withdrawn, always spacing out. But still, Ino chooses her to be her partner for the chem project and walks with her to her house. They walk side by side, already discussing the details of their project. As they near their destination, Sakura lags behind a bit while Ino speeds past the empty house right next to hers.

Sakura looks up at it with almost a sort of longing, and Ino rushes back and grabs her by the wrist as though she is pulling her into safety. She visibly shudders. "Haven't you heard yet?" Ino asks. "A murderer used to live there."

[286]

After weeks and months of deliberation, the two of them finally enter the haunted house.

Sakura comes prepared, with a Bible and a bottle of holy water in her backpack, a rosary wrapped around her wrist, and a flashlight in her hand, even though they've decided to do it in broad daylight. Sasuke looks at her incredulously when she zips up her bag after showing off her 'survival kit.'

She sticks close to him, close enough to touch without really touching. If Sasuke minds her hovering, he doesn't bother letting her know. He turns the knob and, predictably, it's locked so he resorts to hurling his shoulder against the door until it breaks open. Sakura blinks dumbly.

"Oh," she almost sounds disappointed, "that's pretty normal. I thought it would just creepily creak open on its own."

He only rolls his eyes at her but motions for her to get behind him as they step into the house. She frowns as she looks around. The house is normal. Just old, dusty, and looted. The hairs on her arms don't raise and her senses are not particularly overwhelmed by some sort of presence. The more she looks around, the more their paranormal investigation just feels like breaking and entering.

"Upstairs," she says, braver now. She stalks past him and climbs up the stairs. She opens the door to the first room she sees and finds it empty, then she moves to the one across it, also empty. She steps into the light that's coming from the window and turns around to face Sasuke. "This is it?"

He frowns, deep in thought. He continues looking around for a little while longer. "There you have it, I guess, Haruno," he shrugs. "Ghosts aren't real."

She groans, rolls her eyes, and adjusts her backpack on her shoulders, before stalking past him. "Let's just go, I have homework to do."

They exit the house, laughing at their own ridiculousness. And just as Sakura reaches behind her to close the front door, it slams shut right on their backs, hard, bringing about a heavy gust of wind. The two of them freeze, eyes wide in shock as they turned to look at each other.

"Holy shit," they both gasp.

[300]

She keeps pebbles in her study desk's drawer for nights like these when she can't sleep, haunted by something she doesn't know. She takes a handful and slides her window open, starts throwing pebbles at her neighbor's window. It takes five before he opens up and they both lean against the windowsill, looking at each other. Sakura almost forgets about the nightmare, the loud noise, the blood, the pain, when she sees him.

She has always thought that Sasuke Uchiha was beautiful, from the moment she saw him in the summer when her family had moved in next-door. But he's an entirely different sight to behold at night, under the pale moonlight. He's dreamy and serene and she tries not to stare too much because they're _friends_.

She inwardly berates herself for ogling then realizes that he's oddly quiet even for himself. "Sasuke-kun?"

He meets her eyes tiredly, like his nights are as sleepless as hers. "I'm having nightmares, too."

[271]

It's an unlikely friendship that blooms between them. Sasuke likes to loiter at the house's empty yard because nobody ever comes to bother him there and, being the new girl in the neighborhood, Sakura's curiosity is piqued by the rumors that surrounds the haunted house.

She bounds down the steps of her own home and sits on the ground next to him, as is their usual. He doesn't have a notebook for doodling this time, just rests with his head on the tree's trunk with earbuds in, uncaring of the world around him. He looks so peaceful like this and she thinks she might be falling a little in love with the boy next door.

There are leaves in his hair and she reaches out to take one off, when he stirs awake. He frowns at her and she giggles. "Hey, Sasuke-kun," she says, eyes shining. "Go inside the house with me."

[304]

After sleepless nights turn into sleepless weeks, when she starts feeling something suspiciously like actual PTSD and he starts looking worse for wear, she manages to convince him to go back into the house. They're being haunted in their dreams and they need answers.

Sakura braces herself, but the interior of the house is as normal as it had been the first time.

"In case we die here," she says, turning to him just before she ascends the stairs. "I just want to let you know that I've had a crush on you from the moment I met you." Blushing furiously, she turned away before he could say anything.

They explore the rooms upstairs once again, searching every nook and cranny, but there is nothing. They move to the backyard which is just an overgrown mess, then the living room that's as empty as the whole house. She's at her wits' end when they're back in the foyer. "What is it about this place?" She pulls at her hair and Sasuke sags against the wall, just as exasperated.

Maybe the house isn't haunted, _they _are.

"This is probably not a good time to bring this up, but… about what you said earlier… I like you, too."

She's broken out of her thoughts by his words. The corners of her mouth curls upward as if in reflex and when she looks up at him, she sees that he has his back to the kitchen and the light filtering in through the windows hit him just right, illuminating the boyish smile he had on right now.

She steps forward, unable to help herself. She wants to taste that smile, feel his lips on hers, run her fingers through his hair, and it's so damn macabre to think about making out in a place like this−then something catches her eyes. Markings on the edge of the wall he's leaning against. She squints her eyes as she looks at it and he takes a step back when she tells him to move.

It's a growth chart, she soon realizes. She follows the horizontal pencil markings and learns that, at age seventeen, **Sasuke** was almost the same height as **Itachi**.

Her heart drops. She gasps. She feels her knees shake. "Sasu… ke…?"

She turns to look at him and his eyes are wide as he reads his own name on the wall, his face pale in pure shock and horror. His hands fly to his head and his face twists in confusion and anguish. "You didn't know," she whispers, as he drops to his knees.

He cries, albeit without tears, and when he starts screaming, the house starts quaking. And then all of a sudden he was gone and she was running out of the house on wobbling knees. She stops and turns back just as she reaches the sidewalk, covers her mouth as she swallows a loud gasp, a strangled cry. She feels her knees give in.

Sasuke lives in that house−and she doesn't understand how she never noticed, how her perception was so skewed that she didn't realize her bedroom window looked out to the haunted house itself.

[310]

Ino tells her about the murderer.

Sakura knows about this, but she doesn't have the details. It's why her mother had been hesitant to send her to the public school in the first place; there had been a school shooting just at the beginning of the year. And Sasuke had been one of the victims.

The shooter had been his brother.

[206]

"The house right next to ours is haunted," was what Sakura's father had said while they were loading up the moving truck. Naturally, she wanders off to said house right after unpacking her things and getting settled in, and she looks up at it almost in dismay. It looks like a house, a perfectly normal house whose occupants just happened to move out. She huffs and she's about to walk the five steps it took to get there when _he _catches her eyes. He's quite hard to miss, wearing all black in the blazing summer heat, sitting at the foot of a big, old tree on the abandoned lot's yard.

He's cute.

"You're not one of the ghosts haunting this house, are you?" she jokes lightly.

He looks up at her, acknowledging her for the first time, then scowls. "Do I _look _like a ghost?"

She laughs. "What's your name then, if you're not a ghost?"

"Sasuke."

"Hi, Sasuke-kun. I'm Sakura."

[365]

Sometimes she sees him from the corner of her eye, no longer by the foot of the tree but from somewhere in the house, the windows upstairs, the room right across from hers… but he disappears when she turns to look at him, when she wants to see him, when she misses him.

One night, she'd tossed and turned in her sleep, restless. She picked up the biggest pebble in her drawer and threw it at Sasuke's window. Glass shattered. He still didn't show.


	2. come back be here

[epilogue]

Sakura moves on in his absence. She cuts her hair, she makes more friends, she does well in school. She passes by his house every day and she's strong enough now not to look, not to check if he's there.

The house next door continues to age ungracefully. She still hears people refer to it as a haunted house but she, of all people, knows it's not. And oh, what she would give to be haunted by him again. But she tells herself that he's in a better place now, and so is she.

[305]

It's Halloween morning, exactly one year since she was last in this house with him. She sits on the floor now, with her back against the wall, the wall he had been leaning against the last time she saw him, the wall he had leaned against to have his height measured, in happier times.

She has a stupid piece of paper in front of her, divided into four sections of yeses and nos, and two pencils crossed over each other. She stares at it intently. She's been pleading with it for almost half an hour now. "Come on, Sasuke-kun," she whispers.

Then it happens. Her breath hitches and she watches the pencil turn, only for it to roll off the paper and across the floor. She rolls her eyes, realizing that it's only the breeze coming in from the broken window. Exasperated, she picks herself up and crumples the piece of paper, takes her pencils, and walks out of the house. "Stupid Charlie, Charlie," she mutters, pulling the door close behind her.

[306]

It's a perfectly normal day when it happens. She goes out for a run like she does every morning, she picks up milk from the local grocery store like she does every week, she checks the mailbox and picks up the newspaper when she reaches her front porch. It's a normal day, and she's just going about her normal routine.

Until she sees a dark figure in her peripheral and she freezes halfway up her porch, already knowing what it is−_who_ it is. She squeezes her eyes shut for a moment, afraid that if she turns to look, he'll disappear again, like he had so many times before. She turns slowly, slowly, slowly…

Her lips part in a soft gasp and then her throat constricts altogether. He's there. _Still _there.

Sasuke Uchiha stands on the sidewalk, hands in his pockets, eyes blank as he stares up at the menacing house before him−_his_ house. His face is impassive as he looks on, totally unaware of her presence, until the sound of her things dropping to the ground snaps his attention to her direction.

His name leaves her lips in a shaky breath and he frowns deeply as she starts wobbling towards him. "Do I know you?" he asks. He looks at her the same way he had the first time she met him, guarded but curious.

She's close enough to touch him now, and he only jerks away and stumbles back when her fingers graze his arm. The shock from just feeling him, his flesh, real enough to touch, drowns out his question. "You're−wait, how?"

"Who are you?"

She just stares at him dumbly. Her comprehension doesn't seem to be working at the moment, her thoughts racing and muddling together. "You're here," she says breathlessly. Her eyes begin to sting from unshed tears.

"Who _are _you?" he asks again, through gritted teeth.

Sasuke looks agitated, almost feral, the same way he looked when she last saw him, on his knees and screaming.

"Excuse me, miss?" A much kinder voice interrupts.

Sakura feels a hand on her shoulder and she instinctively jerks away from the stranger's touch. Then a boy with wild blond hair steps between them, completely obscuring Sasuke from her view. She tries to look past but the boy only steps forward to block her, slowly backing her up until she's close to her own front porch again. "Were you teme's secret girlfriend or something?"

The question surprises her enough that she turns her attention to him now. "Uh−no, I'm his neighbor. I thought he…"

She trails off and he easily picks up, shaking his head in response. "He was in a coma," he explains, "for a little over half a year, I think? He actually woke up around this time last year. As you can tell, it's his first time back in town so he's a little disoriented. Emotions running high, yanno? He'll probably remember who you are after some time. Just give him space for now, yeah?"

"I'm Naruto, by the way. His best friend." He holds his hand out and she shakes it in a daze.

A coma, huh…

She's relieved, beyond words. If he'd woken up around this time in the past year, then that explained his sudden disappearance, the absence of his presence in the weeks following the last time she saw him. But what did it mean? Is it all lost? Everything that happened while he was unconscious, the whole time he was here, with her, was it all gone? Does he really not… remember her?

"Oh god," she breathes out. She puts a hand over her mouth as tears begin to spill from her eyes. Naruto's eyes widen in alarm before he hesitantly reaches out to comfort her. "Thank god, he's alive," she sobs.

[19:39]

A knock comes on the door just as Sakura is about to go to her room.

"I'll get it!" she says, loud enough for her parents to hear from the kitchen. She wants nothing but to go to bed, emotionally and mentally exhausted from her eventful morning. And as if he knows she's missing him, she opens the door to Sasuke, casually standing there as if he didn't shake her world to its core twice in one lifetime.

"Er… Karin's here! I'll just step out for a bit!"

She closes the door behind her and follows him when he sits on her front porch's steps, side by side in the cold. This close, she could feel his warmth, something she didn't feel before and easily chalked off to the cold autumn weather.

She's entirely overwhelmed by the situation and she wants nothing than to throw herself at him and hold him tightly, tell him how much she misses him and how much it killed her when he disappeared, but she knows Naruto is right. Sasuke is as confused as she is, as overwhelmed, and crowding him wouldn't do him any good. He's traumatized, she has to remind herself, having been shot at by his own big brother.

"So, uhm…"

"How do you know me?" he cuts to the chase. And it's so _good_, so good to hear his voice again.

She thinks on the question for a long moment, considering her words with care. She bites her lip in deep thought and tries to ignore the way his eyes draw to her mouth. "This is going to sound crazy," she starts hesitantly. "But we were _friends_. You were here. While you were… sleeping."

His face twists in confusion, his struggle plain and obvious as he tries to wrap his mind around it. "Like… a ghost?"

"Exactly a ghost." She cringes, "I told you it sounds crazy!"

They fall into silence and if she closes her eyes, it's easy enough to pretend that this is one of those afternoons she spent with him, sitting at the foot of the tree, talking about everything and nothing at all. Sometimes they would drift into comfortable silence and other times they would plot their paranormal venture into the haunted house….

"Don't you… remember me at all?"

He clenches his jaw and draws his eyebrows together thoughtfully, before turning to her and shaking his head. "But," he breathes out, "I have this vague feeling that I know you from somewhere."

It's not much. It's nothing, really. But she feels relief flood through her. "I'm sorry," she says sheepishly, shaking her head a little. "This is weird, but can I hold your hand?"

His brow shoots up in surprise and the elegant curve of it is all too familiar that her heart _sings_, along with the way a corner of his mouth quirks up in an amused smirk. He snorts, shaking his head as he reaches down and touches her hand. She holds her breath when his fingers ghost over her palm as they slide into the spaces between her fingers. He squeezes her hand and she cries for the nth time that day.

She covers his hand with her other one and he says nothing as she cries into his shoulder. He doesn't let go of her hand, doesn't awkwardly push her away. Instead, she feels his fingers in her hair, combing through her hair and pressing softly against her scalp. And when he does let go of her hand, it's so he could run his hand up and down her back to soothe her. She wraps her arms around him then and he holds her with his chin resting on top of her head.

[20:02]

Sasuke pushes her away just enough to cup her face in his hands. He wipes her tears away with his thumbs and once her cheeks are dry, his thumbs continue stroking her cheekbones. Sakura sighs pleasantly and leans into his touch. "I also have this vague feeling that I've kissed you before," he murmurs quietly.

She huffs. She shakes her head, unable to fight the smile that's tugging at the corners of her mouth. "Not really," she says coyly. "But we were definitely going to. You _did _say that you liked me."

"Did I?" He's close enough now that she could feel his smirk right against her own lips.

Sasuke doesn't give her a chance to answer, as he presses his lips against hers. And it's sweet and perfect and electrifying, everything she had thought it would be when she wanted to kiss him that day in the house, and more.

It's funny. He's the one risen from the dead and yet it's Sakura who feels as though he's breathing life into her.

* * *

**a/n**: see, i never really explicitly said sasuke _D-worded_... also i changed the title to ghosted from haunted because i just realized when i was re-reading it that sasuke _literally_ ghosted sakura in the first part.


End file.
